Keith Frame: Engineer embraces energy innovations

BY GUS MORGAN

With youthful eyes, Keith Frame would watch the Halliburton trucks, rumbling back and forth from the desert, the vehicles resembling giant red ants.

The oilfield services company’s equipment yard — adjacent to the compound where Keith lived — provided the Scottish lad a front-row seat to the oil and gas industry.

“When I was 6, we moved from Scotland to Saudi Arabia,” Keith said. “My dad worked as an accountant for an engineering firm.”

The impressionable expat spent six years in Al Khobar in the Eastern province, the energy industry imprinting on him, influencing his career path.

"I’ve never entertained the notion of going into any other profession.”

Net-zero ambition

During his 23-year engineering career, Keith has worked in onshore and offshore operations, brownfield and greenfield capital projects, LNG and technology development. He’s had assignments supporting business in the UK, the Middle East, Australia, the U.S. Lower 48 and Corporate.

Over the years, Keith’s passion for the energy industry has only intensified.

As a principal engineer with the ConocoPhillips Low Carbon Technologies (LCT) organization, Keith is helping the company’s business units in evaluating proposals that would allow them to reduce emissions by qualifying greenhouse gas reduction projects.

"Our ambition is to be net-zero for operational emissions by 2050."

To help the business units achieve that goal, Keith and his LCT colleagues are investigating emerging technologies and technical solutions for deployment.

The approach Keith and the LCT organization are taking, in collaboration with the Global Technical Functions, is to be both problem-driven and solution-driven.

“As each business unit evaluates and prepares their net-zero roadmap, we work with them to seek out and qualify technologies that would solve their identified problems. At the same time, we are on the lookout for emerging and promising solutions that may mature to be applicable to a business unit in the future and recommend deploying solutions in pilot programs.”

Keith, who has a master’s degree in engineering and chemical engineering with an emphasis on environmental management from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has always been enthusiastic about nature and the environment.

In 1997, during a 12-week intern assignment with ConocoPhillips in Aberdeen, Keith had the chance to use his environmental skills. Working in the health, safety and environmental (HSE) department, Keith helped calculate the emissions footprint of the Southern North Sea offshore facilities.

“Fast forward to 2022, and we’re doing the same thing across our assets. We’re still doing emissions reporting … for a large part of my career, I’ve always looked out for solutions that would provide for green opportunities.”

Environmental steward

Working in an engineering supervisory role, Keith played a key role in the Australia Pacific LNG project, helping build the Curtis Island facility — located off the shore of Queensland, just north of the city of Gladstone — from the ground up.

“It was a once in a lifetime experience to see a site like that turned into the facility that it is today.”

During the project, Keith collaborated with local authorities to devise an alternative solution to a proposed desalination plant for the island’s water supply. At issue: the desalination plant would have discharged wastewater into the harbor, part of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, an environmentally sensitive area.

Instead of the desalination option, Keith and his colleagues collaborated with the Gladstone Area Water Board and Gladstone Regional Council to devise a more environmentally friendly solution, one that extended freshwater and sewage connections from the mainland to the island.

“I'm pretty proud of that.”

Speed of innovation

Keith knows technological advancements will play a crucial role in the energy transition, the digital realm driving solutions to the industry’s challenges. The pace of such change can be swift, as demonstrated on a personal level.

For example, back in 2019, Keith and his twin daughters were clearing out their house in Scotland when they stumbled across an original Nintendo Gameboy, a handheld video game that features a tiny green screen and just a few buttons.

“I pulled it out of the box and my 10-year-olds were amazed. They were like, ‘What is this?’ They were shocked and surprised by how it looked. But I was looking at it through nostalgic glasses, remembering when I got it and thinking how it was amazingly advanced.”

This past Christmas, Keith bought Alice a Facebook Oculus virtual reality headset, the advanced gaming device a testament to how rapidly technology can evolve.

“So, if you think about that, digital is all around us, and it’s a game changer. For us, we don’t know where technology is going in our industry, but whatever technology we stand up in the next 10 or 15 years is going to help us with our net-zero ambition.”

Evolving to meet the energy transition

And much like technology, Keith continues to evolve, each new project enhancing his perspective, sharpening his skills and expanding his understanding of a progressing industry. But one thing hasn’t changed: his longstanding pursuit of green opportunities.

In an evolving oil and gas industry, Keith’s background and skills makes him uniquely qualified to help ConocoPhillips enhance its sustainability endeavors.

“I always felt that if there was going to be an opportunity to make a difference, it was probably better to do it from the inside rather than from the outside.”